Understanding Your Right to Vote

By Claudia Isler

The right to vote was a hard fought, hard won campaign. With voter apathy still a huge issue during every major election, women, African Americans, and young people need to understand that without the efforts of some amazing pioneers, they may not have the right to vote at all. This informative historical guide follows some of these pioneers through history as they struggled, worked, protested, and won their rights to vote as American citizens. Not only does it preserve these great moments in history, it gives modern voters a reason to get out and vote.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosen Publishing
• Release date: Aug 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448846764

Book preview

Published in 2012 by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.

29 East 21st Street, New York, NY 10010

Copyright © 2012 by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Quinn, Barbara, 1974-

Understanding your right to vote/Barbara Quinn, Claudia Isler.—1st ed.

p. cm.—(Personal freedom and civic duty)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4488-4665-8 (library binding)

I.    Suffrage—United States—Juvenile literature. 2. Suffrage— United States—History—Juvenile literature. I. Isler, Claudia.

II.    Title.

JK1846.Q85 2012 324.6'20973—dc22

2010046001

Manufactured in the United States of America

CPSIA Compliance Information: Batch #S11YA: For further information, contact Rosen Publishing, New York, New York, at 1-800-237-9932.

On the cover: It is fairly easy to register to vote if you know where to go. Right before an election, you will likely find people offering to help you to register. If not, you can find the forms online.

Introduction

Chapter 1

How the Right to Vote affects you

Chapter 2

Giving african americans the Right to Vote

Chapter 3

Giving Women the Right to Vote

Chapter 4

Giving young People the Right to Vote

Chapter 5

The struggle over the Right to Vote Continues

The Bill of Rights

Glossary

For More Information

For Further Reading

Index

It was the summer of 1964. Ninety-four years before, the Fifteenth Amendment was passed, I allowing men to vote, regardless of the color of their skin. Fifty years later, women won the right to vote. And yet, in the small town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964 some people were still fighting for that right. Despite the fact that voting was legal for African Americans, some were too afraid to go to the polls or even register. People were threatened and sometimes even beaten or arrested.

Above photo: In modern times, almost everyone age eighteen or older can vote thanks to the hard work of several historical Americans. And thanks to modern technology, new voting machines have taken out some of the guesswork as well.

College students began flooding in from northern states as part of the Mississippi Summer Project, developed to bring awareness to the voting cause in Mississippi. They were there to help teach people about voter registration and bring awareness to the plight of many Mississippians.

On June 21, two of these students—Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both white—and a local African American activist, James Chaney, drove out to investigate a recent Ku Klux Klan incident. On their way back, they were arrested on a minor traffic charge. Believers in nonviolence, the three did not resist. And when they were released several hours later, the three men began driving toward the nearby town of Meridian. On the way there, they vanished.

After a forty-four-day search of the area, the FBI discovered the bodies of the three men. They had been killed by a mob of Ku Klux Klan members and dumped on a local dairy farm. Twenty-one men were arrested in connection with the crime. And in 1967, seven of the defendants were found guilty.

The murders of the three civil rights workers finally brought much-needed attention to the violation of voting rights in Mississippi.

In 2006, Mississippi had the highest number of African American elected officials in the country.

In America, people have been fighting and dying for the right to vote for hundreds of years. In this book, we’ll explore why voting is important, even worth dying for.

Chapter 1

To understand why it’s important to stay informed about issues that affect the world, your country, your state, or the city where you live, you need to know some simple facts. How does government work? If a law is unfair, how do we change it? Why do we vote? Is voting really that important?

A lot of people take their right to vote for granted. They watch the news or read the paper and complain about what the mayor did last week, what the president did last year, or what they’re teaching kids in school these days. Some people plan to vote for someone else, a new mayor or president, at the next election. But some of those people who are unhappy with the way things are won’t vote at all. They don’t understand that voting is a way to make their voices heard. They let the people who do vote make the decisions for them. And they don’t remember all the people who fought so hard, at so much personal sacrifice, to win the right to vote.

Voters pick their candidates using a computerized voting system. When they finish filling out their ballots, the votes are counted using a computerized scanner.

An Introduction to Voting

Let’s start with the basics. In a way, the government is made up of many governments. The federal government, based in and around Washington, D.C., shares its power with the governments of each state, and each state with the governments of each city and town. Congress, a part of the federal government, is made up of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Congress creates laws. The president, vice president, and Supreme Court are also part of the federal government. The president represents the executive branch of the federal government. This is the branch that enforces laws. The Supreme Court makes sure that all of the laws passed by Congress are fair.

Supreme Court justice confirmations, like the one shown here for Justice Elena Kagan, are held by the Senate Judiciary Committee. A majority vote of the senators present is required for confirmation.

Why are there so many government offices and departments? When the writers of the U.S. Constitution were working out a plan for government, they wanted to make sure that the central government would not have so much power that the people’s rights would be limited. They wanted to create a system in which none of the branches of government would have too much power, so they created a system of checks and balances. Each branch of the government has the power to undo what the other branches do.

For example, the president can veto (reject) laws passed by Congress, Congress can override (dismiss) the president’s veto, and the Supreme Court and other federal courts can overturn laws that violate (go against) the Constitution. The president picks the members of the Supreme Court. Congress can make changes to the Constitution with approval from three-quarters of the states.

The U.S. Constitution

The Constitution, which defines the structure and power of the federal government, was written in 1787. It was ratified (approved) by eleven of the thirteen states in 1789. A change to the Constitution is called an amendment. The first ten amendments to the Constitution are called the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791. The Bill of Rights guarantees American citizens many freedoms that we take for granted, such as the freedom to practice one’s religion, the freedom to openly and publicly criticize the government, and the freedom to gather in protest. It also offers the guarantee of a military to protect us, a lawyer to defend us if we go